Dealers (or fellow collectors) who lit the fire

[Writehooks]

For me, it started with mailing $8 (Canadian!) to a guy in Detroit for a four-issue subscription to The Sports Hobbyist, circa 1974. I remember the price, because he sent a note with the first issue, commenting on how "cool" the Canuck $2 bills looked. It was a pretty amateurish publication, but fascinating nonetheless.

As I recall, the only professional-looking ad was for The Card Collectors Company in NYC. When I received their first catalog, I spent the whopping sum of $40 to acquire complete Topps hockey sets from 1962-65. I subsequently acquired a couple of dozen T206s (which I later swapped for more hockey cards) and began corresponding with some of the classified advertisers. Subscriptions to The Trader Speaks and SCD quickly followed, and I've been hooked ever since...